Marion Baruch/NAME DIFFUSION

Critical text

Marion Baruch (b. 1929, Timisoara) began studying art in Jerusalem in 1949 and continued her studies in Rome from 1955 while working as a textile designer for the textile industry. Since its beginning Baruch’s work has addressed societal issues such as questions of emancipation, repression, consumption, mass production, or modern working conditions. The artist has become known in recent years for her textile works, created from remnants of fabrics from the Milan fashion industry, which she precisely pins to the walls, highlighting the empty spaces in the fabric and addressing the labor world of the textile trade and resource consumption. Since the 1980s, she has been interested in industrial production, design, and the distribution of goods, leading to the founding of her company, Name Diffusion. Under this label, Baruch carried out collective artistic actions from 1993 to 2010 that dealt with socio-political issues, mobility, migratory globalization, and exile. At Back to the Future, she presents the objects Untitled (1991), signed by her company. Each wooden box contains an unspecified name in 3-D styrofoam letters and the company logo as neon text. This offering plays with market significance and system critique, as the product remains nameless.

Text by Heike Munder

The artist’s voice

This is the basic idea of NAME DIFFUSION: what is NAME without DIFFUSION? what is DIFFUSION without NAME? […] Name Diffusion produces itself as merchandise, offers the merchandise “par excellence”: the NAME that denies and approves at once itself, a merchandise in a world of market.